The Basics of Email Newsletter Design

Email is one of the standard ways of professional communication in today's tech-filled world. It forms a major messaging platform for industries to stay in touch with their registered clients and provides a secure and authenticated way of communication for companies to maintain their client information records.

The email newsletter is one of the best ways for companies to send their updates to the registered customers of their site. It can be easily sent and managed with the help of management tools available widely by many host providers, and it really helps in maintaining customer relationships. In this article, we shall check on the basic points to remember while designing an email newsletter for successful and neat output.

Idea of the Newsletter :The email newsletter should be designed based on the content on the company website. The website and the newsletter should complement each other. All information should be made clear in short sentences as long essays may bore the readers.

Design:The layout should be responsive and user-friendly. A table-based layout should be considered, as many email clients like Outlook don’t display div or float in a perfect manner. Also, all the CSS styling should be maintained as inline styles, as newsletters don’t include style sheets.

Width:While designing the layout using tables, you need to check for fixed width factor to be mentioned everywhere while mentioning the table tag. You can use ‘width=”100%”’ or you can also mention in pixel-based values. The most common value is around 500-600 px in order to support all media ports.

Unit:It is always best to stay with ‘Pixels –px’ as the unit while designing email newsletters since percentage factors don't display well in many email readers.

Supported and Unsupported CSS Elements:It is important to consider the elements supported and unsupported by email readers while designing the newsletter. The use of unsupported elements might spoil the design when views in certain email clients.

Anchor Tags:While mentioning links to another website from the newsletter, it is important to consider the following so as to improve the look of the hyperlinks in the newsletter --

Remember to mention ‘target=”_blank”’ over all the hyperlink tags so that the email client won’t move from the current document opened while reading the newsletter.While styling the CSS for the hyperlinks, as all styles are mentioned inline since you need to keep a separate style for the link and also mention the enclosed value with a span mentioned CSS to maintain the style of the hyperlink even if any design issues pop up in the email reader. We also need to check on the hover effect in our design as a few email readers don’t support this effect.

Images:If you need to include images in the newsletter, you'll need to maintain all the images on your server. You'll also need to link these images directly from the server while writing the code for the newsletter. Also, all the CSS factors for the image should be mentioned in line with the img tag in the HTML for the email template.

Spam :It is important to check that your email reaches the proper inbox folder, since some of the email providers may forward the newsletter to the spam folder. Check all the possible email reading clients and do tests to ensure proper delivery of the email newsletter.

By following these basic principles, you can now design the perfect email newsletter! Go and get creative!

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